Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Super Magician Versus All the Brown People

And how about some phallic imagery with your crude, dehumanizing stereotypes? With his pale white face and his shock of white hair, Blackstone the Magician is constantly shown besting some group or other of misshapen subhuman jungle savages in the pages of Super-Magician Comics (Street and Smith, 1941). If you check out that cover gallery, you'll see that Blackstone spends an inordinate amount of time during the first two years rescuing porcelain-skinned white women from evil capering black voodoo guys. Then by Volume 3, someone must've told the artist to knock it off, and we see more scatter-shot race baiting aimed at Arabs, Hindi, Indians. Eskimos and the ever-popular Japanese. As appalling as these are, I have to admit to liking the liberal application of the word "INCREDIBLE" all over each and every cover.

Okay, I also like the bored expression on the girl's face as she simmers. And that she's wearing a Jughead crown. BUT THAT'S IT.

I'm the Caucasian half of a very happy bi-racial marriage, so I have some -second hand only- idea of the crap black people have been through in this country's history. I'm glad the times of Super Magician Comics are over. That said, it was published from 1941-1947, so there was "some" excuse for these in that everyone was doing it. But Super-Magician Comics did it a LOT.

Certainly not politically correct, but it's got sharp modern-looking graphic design. I thought the first cover sort of reminded me of this Batman one http://www.comics.org/coverview.lasso?id=100042&zoom=4

Old comics should be not taken out of their owntime frame context.By today standard they are unsensitive and even border racism.But at the time people did not know better, in fact most caucasians people did not even know a personof any other race.These comics are now pretty much historical documents depicting the outdated mentality of a time long gone.